The present invention generally relates to a storage system and a data management method in such a storage system, and in particular relates to a storage system that provides a storage service to a home server via a network as well as to a data management method using such a storage system.
In the homes of general users, various types of digital products, such as digital cameras, digital video recorders, personal computers, printers and the like, that process multimedia data are widely prevalent. In recent years, a home network system for connecting these digital products to a home network has been proposed, and there are even storage service providers who provide storage services to individual home network systems.
For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-192602 discloses a technology where a home server for controlling and managing a home network system connected to a plurality of home digital products storages data, and, by the home server periodically transferring and backing up the stored data to a portal server connected via the Internet, the lost data that was stored in the home server is restored based on the data backed up to the portal server if the home server malfunctions.
In addition, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-334544 discloses a technology where a content storage server stores a content received from a content sale server, creates and stores link information of such content, extracts the link information according to the content usage request received from a user terminal, extracts the content based on the extracted link information, and sends such content to the user.